Mark’s Advanced Prototype Nature
This morning we found a video of Mark 1 interacting with none other than the actual voice of Mark, Alan. The video highlighted something the Mycroft Team knows intimately, that Mark 1 is still a work in progress.
Our production blog post spoke briefly about how Mycroft is a small team chasing a massive vision. While we might be from Kansas City, it’s not all yellow brick roads. Software and hardware development comes with lots of hiccups, but we’re committed to transparency; it’s what got us started in the first place.
Mark 1 deliveries are reaching our crowdfunders as we speak and we are embracing each piece of feedback we get. Honest reviews allow us to see how different users interact with Mark 1, sometimes in ways we could have never predicted.
When you open your Mark 1 box, you will see a card that details it’s advanced prototype nature. This is far from a polished product, but is continually learning and evolving. We want to take a few minutes to talk about Mark 1; his features, shortcomings, and potential iterations.
What Mark 1 Does Well:
- What is the weather?
- Date and Time:
- What time is it?
- What is today’s/tomorrow’s date?
- Set a timer for ___ minutes.
- Remind me at ___ to do ___.
- Personal Questions:
- Who are you?
- What are you?
- Who made you?
- When were you born?
- Where do you come from?
- What is your IP address? (displays & reads network interface addresses)
- Install [X] skill.
- Say [X] (repeats phrase)
- Sing a song.
- Spell [X].
- Tell me about [X] (Wikipedia search)
- What / when / where [X]? (Wolfram Alpha search)
- What is the current stock price of [X]?
- Play the news.
- [Start | stop | play] recording.
- Tell me a joke!
What's to Come from Mark 1:
- We still have a lot of work to do in order to improve wake word recognition.
- The voice user experience is still young and the skills we’ve developed need significant refinement.
- We also have many skills that need to be created, including inter-device intercom channels, Spotify, Roku, as well as several others.
A final note from our Opening your Mark 1 Box blog post:
“To put the required resources in perspective; our friends at Amazon acquired three companies, spent four years and tens of millions of dollars building Alexa’s voice services. Here at Mycroft we’ve made great progress in the 18 months we’ve had available, but we still aren’t at par. We are, however, actively advancing.”
Alyx works as a business analyst for Mycroft, working with data to shape metrics and the broader marketing strategy. She also writes these blog posts.